Posts tagged treaty

The Electronic Frontier Foundation did some preliminary analysis of ACTA. What it comes down to is that ACTA is about to require that signatory countries impose liabilities on ISPs for their users’ behaviors. That means ISPs need to be enforcers/police/nannys for their users. And US ISPs will lose any protections they currently enjoy from the DMCA.

If you use the Internet to share copyrighted information, YOUR ISP could face penalties. Do you think ISPs will accept this? You might expect ISPs to be up in arms about ACTA, but instead they look like they might accept ACTA openly. By all counts ISPs were lucky the FCC lost the case against Comcast. Otherwise ISPs would have no way to be an enforcer! Just kidding.

A few months ago I started this blog entry and then left it sit because I was so angry about what the potential outcome could mean to the ISP industry. Today I read this article on Wired that give me some hope that the world isn’t about to end for ISPs so I decided to revisit this entry and see if it still makes sense. Let’s see…

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We live in a society that has mostly agreed on what is right and what is wrong. We have coined the term, Common Values in order to build communities where we can agree on what is acceptable behaviour. To enforce our safe communal living, we turned these common values into laws. As a society, we have set up governments to enforce the laws (common values) and protect us from those who would harm us.

As members of society, I think we’re all in agreement that theft is a bad thing. No matter what country you are from, it’s pretty much a given that stealing is frowned upon. It’s a pretty common value, maybe even sacrosanct.